Skew characters and cyclic sieving

In 2010, Rhoades proved that promotion on rectangular standard Young tableaux, together with the associated fake-degree polynomial, provides an instance of the cyclic sieving phenomenon. We extend this result to m-tuples of skew standard Young tableaux of the same shape, for fixed m, subject to the condition that the mth power of the associated fake-degree polynomial evaluates to nonnegative integers at roots of unity. However, we are unable to specify an explicit group action. Put differently, we determine in which cases the mth tensor power of a skew character of the symmetric group carries a permutation representation of the cyclic group. To do so, we use a method proposed by Amini and the first author, which amounts to establishing a bound on the number of border-strip tableaux of skew shape. Finally, we apply our results to the invariant theory of tensor powers of the adjoint representation of the general linear group. In particular, we prove the existence of a bijection between permutations and Stembridge’s alternating tableaux, which intertwines rotation and promotion.

Cyclic Sieving for Plane Partitions and Symmetry

The cyclic sieving phenomenon of Reiner, Stanton, and White says that we can often count the fixed points of elements of a cyclic group acting on a combinatorial set by plugging roots of unity into a polynomial related to this set. One of the most impressive instances of the cyclic sieving phenomenon is a theorem of Rhoades asserting that the set of plane partitions in a rectangular box under the action of promotion exhibits cyclic sieving. In Rhoades's result the sieving polynomial is the size generating function for these plane partitions, which has a well-known product formula due to MacMahon. We extend Rhoades's result by also considering symmetries of plane partitions: specifically, complementation and transposition. The relevant polynomial here is the size generating function for symmetric plane partitions, whose product formula was conjectured by MacMahon and proved by Andrews and Macdonald. Finally, we explain how these symmetry results also apply to the rowmotion operator on plane partitions, which is closely related to promotion.